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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

For over forty years, Chicago has been the political
plantation of the Daley Family where corruption, racism, and segregation has reigned unchecked. Last year, Richard M. Daley retired
after twenty plus years and Rahm Emmanuel is now Mayor. It was far more of a selection than election because Emmanuel was an original
fundraiser and close political advisor to Daley. Daley also sent him Congress before he became Chief
of Staff to President Obama. President Obama, breaking precedent where sitting presidents avoid involvement in local elections, especially in their own parties primaries, actively promoted Emmanuel for Mayor in the Democratic Primary. Finally Emmanuel's brother Ari Emmanuel, a wealthy CEO of a Hollywood entertainment, media, and talent agency, poured in an ocean of cash from Hollywood stars such as Steven Spielberg to match the millions from Chevron, Walgreens, Fox and Steve Jobs

As Mayor, Rahm Emmanuel has not only furthered Daley's policy of ethnic cleansing of poor and middle class Blacks and Hispanics out of Chicago, but intensified class stratification by

continuing to reward his wealthy campaign contributors with

contracts from the mass privatization schemes, such as the public schools, at the expense of poor children and teachers.

Two weeks ago, the plantation came under siege. Tens of thousands of protesters from Illinois
and through out the United States, took to the streets in solidarity with The Occupy Wall
Street Movement in protest of The North American Treaty Organization ( NATO), and the further enrichment of the plutocratic class at the expense of the rest
of America.

Beforehand, Chicagoans were warned that anarchist, who called themselves the "Black Bloc" would use peaceful protest as subterfuge to destroy property and wreck havoc
similar to the violent actions in London and Seattle. But any politically astute Chicagoan knew that Chicago Police, skilled in the art of brute violence and thuggery,
wouldn’t allow some out-of-town white kids to make them look weak. But the mayor did use the pretense of anarchist
violence to purchase, from federal funds awarded from the White House, millions of dollars of military grade weapons and a few
helicopters from some favorite military vendors.

But the protests were a mass success, besides some bumbled
framing of protesters by Chicago Police informants abetted by a local
prosecutorial system already infamous for framing and protecting police torture.
The protesters over all handled
themselves in the spirit of Martin Luther King. More importantly, these protests connected with earlier protests earlier this spring, against the privatizing of public schools, mortgage foreclosures, and
the closing of community clinics, seemed to signify a new awaking of a Chicago
citizenry, who more than any other big city has grown complacent and comfortable under a political empire.

But the man marketed to bring us change, President Obama has just signed a bill, passed with over whelming support in both houses of Congress that undermines not just this movement in Chicago, but democracy itself.

House Bill 347, innocuously named, as if not to raise alarm, the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act", transforms the Secret Service into a modern version of the East German Stasi, that during the cold war was one of the most ruthlessly repressive security organizations. Actually this bill could have come from the Vladimir Putin play book of criminalizing political protests.

Now, today in America, any citizen who stages a protests against a President in his/her vicinity, faces

a mandatory ten year imprisonment under federal law for “disorderly” or “disruptive" conduct as defined by the secret service.

Further The President doesn't even have to be in
the vicinity to trigger an arrest by the secret service. Public events with no connection
to government business now fall under this act as “National Special Security
Events".

Equally disturbing, President Obama can now assign the secret service to protect any elected official or citizen. Can you picture President Obama assigning
secrete service, paid for by us tax payers, to protect bank presidents like
CitiBank’s Jamie Dimon, then arresting protesters who get near him?

The Federal
Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act and its quick and overwhelming
bipartisan support reminds me of the line in Shakespear's Macbeth, “By the prickling of my
thumbs, something wicked this way comes"

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

I'm back or am I? Metamorphosed from a Spook into something else. Same intensity, but quieter now, because things are less safe, in this world.

Notes From a "Post Black" America

Myra Greene is a local artists ( I have posted some of her work) who like numerous Black people have leaped into a world of whiteness. In her case a conscious choice that she says is based upon her profession and her travels.

This is strange because when I travel I always seek out those who "look" like me and although this is more difficult in a work environment, I would think it would be easier for a Black artist to find more, "people of color" to connect with.

I suspect that Ms. Greene is in fact more comfortable around white people due to her historical lot in life. But this is speculation, well sort of, as her latest work is entitled "My White Friends"which is a series of portraits of 50 of her White friends, which certainly is a lot of white friends. But this makes me appreciate her even more because unlike so many Black folk who are more comfortable in White worlds, she doesn't pretend not to notice, which drives me insane when Black people pretend other wise.

Ms. Green is not only honest but uses her art to root around to strike that sensitive nerve of all conscious Black people."I'm always thinking about race" she says. "I recognize it when I'm the only black person in a room. My white friend will notice I'm the only black person, too. But they don't notice a room full of white people", she states.

Indeed, there are few "safe" spaces and times were Black people do not have to remember who they are, because often their legal freedom and even their very life depends upon this recognition. Trayvon Martin is a case and point, and lets go a little deeper with arbitrary barriers. On July 27, 1919 a week long race riot was started in Chicago after an Black teenager was drowned in Lake Michigan after being stoned when he floated across an "established" barrier in the water separating the white beach from the black beach. The riot ended after being suppressed by the national guard, leaving 23 Blacks and 15 Whites dead with more than 500 were injured and the homes of 1,000 black families torched.

So I do have a few white friends who I consider more associates, but I notice that when I go to their parties I am the only Black person there and I do consider this a reflection of who they really are past their liberal veneers.

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Followers

I am an invisible man.

Chapter One;
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"